Mastercard (NYSE: MA) recently announced an expansion of its Engage partner network to include its open banking services, “offering customers easy access to several technology partners that can quickly build and deploy open banking solutions for payments and lending decisioning at scale.”
According to Mastercard’s 2022 New Payment Index, 83% of consumers globally “use digital tools for at least one financial task, and more than half use technology for five or more tasks.”
With the rapid adoption of open banking (i.e., consumer-permissioned data access) and digital tools across financial services experiences, Mastercard will “work with technology partners to spur innovation through access to its open banking platform, from lending to payments to financial management.”
The initial partners to join the Mastercard Engage program for open banking “include Dwolla, FinTech Automation, i2c, Link Financial Technology, LoanPro, Nova Credit, Provenir, Synctera, Tern and Usio, Inc.”
Through this new program, these providers will “partner with Mastercard open banking to offer services to their clients.” Other benefits “are fewer contracts, faster access to customers, data security and access, and overall flexibility to better leverage Mastercard’s robust open banking services.”
Mastercard has “a long-standing track record of working with technology and fintech partners to build the future of financial services and enable more choices for consumers.”
With three billion cardholders and 93 million merchants, “the more partners Mastercard has, the more powerful the flywheel of their network becomes.”
Since 2018, nearly 150 partners around the world “have joined the Mastercard Engage program.”
In the last year alone, “nearly 100 Engage partners have helped their customers deploy new, innovative solutions on more than 250 million accounts with Mastercard digital services, including all-digital consumer payments experiences, tokenization, digital wallet, mobile POS solutions and now open banking.”
Jess Turner, executive vice president, Global Open Banking and API at Mastercard, said:
“The partners joining Mastercard Engage are leading the deployment of open banking solutions that are designed with security at the center and will help to meet consumers’ financial needs and enable choice. Together we can enable innovation that will increase financial inclusion and expand access to digital services across the globe.”
Open banking through Mastercard and its technology partners “allows businesses to establish direct consumer-permissioned connections with their customers’ bank accounts.”
Through these consumer-permissioned connections, businesses can “verify accounts for payments and payouts, check balances to reduce payment failures, and cut fraud by confirming bank account ownership.”
This has “improved the payment experience for both the businesses and their customers.”
Similarly for lending, borrowers can directly “permission data and insights through the ecosystem to support their lending decisioning processes.” This also “means a better lending experience for both the lender and borrower, as it provides financial insights, expanded data sets not available through paper submissions, increased financial inclusion, and a simplified experience.”
The Engage program “provides two new direct implementation options for partners — Partner Linked and Partner Direct.” These methods “provide a seamless and secure implementation of consumer-permissioned data through Mastercard’s open banking services and can be used together or separately, depending on the preference of the financial technology provider.”
As an Engage technology partner, additional benefits include:
- Go-to-market collaboration – Helps technology providers sell and deploy their solution in new markets and find new customers.
- Promotion – Partners are featured on Mastercard’s portal to gain visibility and credibility with all Mastercard customers.
- Training & insights – Mastercard Academy gives partners access to a series of product and solution training sessions. They can also participate in regional forums with insights from Mastercard and its partners around value and product propositions as well as market priorities.
- Technical support – Partners gain access to a network of global and regional technical engineers that can help them address technical questions.
Mastercard Engage expanded last year “to support customers in deploying Digital First experiences that meet consumer demand for more digital experiences and provide more choice in payment options.” The program includes partners that “offer various components and integration capabilities across all business verticals, serving banks, merchants, lenders and fintech customers.”
Continuing the momentum from the launch of the Start Path Open Banking program last month, the expansion of Engage “further demonstrates Mastercard’s dedication to supporting fintechs that are enabling consumers to securely access and manage their data.”
Some Mastercard open banking platform services “are delivered through its wholly-owned subsidiary, Finicity.” Open banking services through the Engage is “a global program, additional partners across markets will be announced in coming months.”
For more details on this update, check here.